Team:Content-Travel-Budget-Management

Using Redmine

We might use Redmine as a ticketing system for the content team (it's probably used by many other teams as well) to manage the requests for travel budgets. In a nutshell we may do the following:

Setup and architecture

• Every member of the content team has an account in redmine, speakers in general do not.
• There is a dedicated issue category for requests for travel budgets, other categories might be later added as well.
• The category has custom fields such as the amount of money requested and the amount of money agreed on. Those are integers/floats and represent the amount of euros. Other fields may be created as well such as the amount of money for which recipes have been handed in.
• Redmine has an email address and tickets can be updated by email. Speakers are anonymous users in redmine and they may add comments to tickets.
• Redmine has an API and a report about the currently planned/requested budget can be genereated, either with redmine itself or via the API or a plugin.
• The status of the travel expense request (requested, agreed upon, recipes handed in, money paid out) is represented as the ticket status.

Workflow

• Speakers submit as usual via pretalx, they may indicate whether they need a travel budget, how much they probably need and potentially also whether their request has a high priority (visa needed, and for the visa they need their flight bookings).
• Once the proposal is accepted, a ticket is created for every speaker who needs support.
• The tickets can then be updated internally via redmine or via email, multiple content team members work on that and different submissions may have a different coordinator in the content team.
• We can always get an overview of all the money we agreed upon either by having a custom report plugin/script or by exporting the tickets as CSV and then analysing the exported table.
• On site, the speakerdesk and potentially more people may get access to the tickets and handle the payout in cash when required.

Assumptions

• We get support from the system administrators and they configure redmine to our needs
• Speakers manage to leave the email subject unchanged, remine uses the subject to assign the mails to the corresponding tickets

Technical background

• Redmine supports custom fileds for some tickets, we use that to model the requested and/or agreed amount in the tickets and potentially also other things such as bank details https://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki/RedmineCustomFields
• Redmine supports updating issues via email https://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki/RedmineReceivingEmails#Issue-attributes
• Redmine has an REST API that can be used to batch create the issues from pretalx, alternatively that might be done via mail as well: https://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki/Rest_api
• Potentially, the helpdesk plugin might be useful as well to enhance the email feature: https://www.redmine.org/plugins/redmine_helpdesk
• A template for a plugin that gives us a good overview of the current budget can be found here: https://github.com/artsafin/redmine_status_report Currently, the best thing known that redmine supports is exporting the issues as CSV, so we have to sum up all the money ourselves.